The Loue

The Loue is a small river in the French Jura, somewhere between Pontarlier and Besancon. You can rent boats in Ornans or at Quingey and spent between 2 hrs and 2 days on the river. In the region there are some gorges and sources to visit, and so we visited the source of the Loue after our trip.

We started on Saturday morning and drove through the Vallee de Travers, a very calm and beautiful valley in the Swiss Jura. In Ornans, we met Schibli and Bircher and rent boats, 3 of them as we were 5 people. It was a bit a complicated thing as the women in the office did not seem to be well organized, but finally we managed to get the boats for two days.
So we started late Saturday a bit up of Ornans itself and got the first bad hit- you are only allowed to stay on the river till 6 o'clock in the evening! The same is true for swimming and all other activities on the river, and we soon saw why- this was a fishers paradise!!! And they were not amused at all about the tourist floating down the river. Nevertheless, we took it easy and so it was no wonder that we did not come far on this first day- but we managed to find a secret nice place for camping.

We continued the next day and after some time we realized what was the second bad thing about the Loue- no flow! If you want to get further, you have to paddle, no chance! Lazy as we were this resulted in a lunch break at the canoe camp, after about 1/4 of what we wanted to do on the river. Suddenly, the guy who seemed to be some kind of manager of the camp saw us eating there and approached us with a huge smile: You never will get to your meeting point today! So we agreed on an other meeting point and floated down the river as easy as before.

Here they still dare

But sometimes, there is really something like action on the Loue- for example at the barrage just after Ornans, where Christian bravely looked for the best way to go down, which resulted in him and all our baggage bathing in the river. Brave Lars and Moni decided to help him immediatly and flow also down- but got also wet... This forced Bircher and Schibli to carry the boat around the barrage.

Another potential source of action is clearly the Source, but you should be a bit more experienced than the non-canoeist among us... Anyway, we visited the source, which is actually not a real source as the Loue is a resurgence of the Doubs, being connected through hidden paths under the earth. This was detected when after an incident in a Pastis company in the valley of the Doubs, the Loue started to turn green and smell like anis....

After the trip all of us agreed that it was nice, but far not as spectacular as the Tarn. We compensated this last weekend with a nice rubberboat trip on the Reuss :-)